Boulez, CSO make beautiful 20th Century music together

December 02, 2006|By John von Rhein, Tribune music critic

Members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's extended family found their Christmas stockings stuffed with all sorts of glad tidings Thursday.

During the afternoon came the welcome news that the CSO will be returning to the radio airwaves in March and that it will soon launch its own in-house recording label for compact discs and digital downloads. That one of the world's great orchestras should have gone five years without radio and recording contracts and a presence on the Internet was a scandal. It's terrific news that management and musicians have finally come to an accord and that a generous corporate sponsor made it happen.

The mood was similarly euphoric Thursday evening at Orchestra Hall, where Pierre Boulez directed his second and final subscription program of the season locally, one week before he and the CSO take up residency at New York's Carnegie Hall.

Our conductor emeritus built his program around three of his specialties -- two works from the early 20th Century (Ravel's "Valses Nobles et Sentimentales," Bartok's "The Miraculous Mandarin") and one from the end (Gyorgy Ligeti's Piano Concerto). The concert found Boulez and our orchestra functioning like a superbly oiled machine, every cog meshing so beautifully as to turn the most reactionary subscribers into fervent modernists.

The metaphor is apt in the case of Ligeti's 1985-87 score, which opens with a rush of hard, clattery sounds tumbling over themselves, like a roomful of player pianos gone berserk.

This is no concerto in any ordinary sense, more like enlarged chamber music in which the pianist and players tease, provoke or simply ignore one another in spiky, dislocated rhythms and meters. Amid the carefully notated chaos, the slide whistle and alto ocarina moan like animals in the night. The late, lamented Hungarian composer heard sounds nobody had heard before, and many of them are in this wry, wonderful piece.

The concerto has become a signature work for Pierre-Laurent Aimard, and this most cerebrally brilliant of today's virtuoso pianists cut through its fearsome difficulties as if the thickets of notes were little more than a warm-up exercise. If anything, Boulez's coordination proved even tighter than when he and Aimard introduced the Ligeti work to Chicago in 1998.

A different sort of chiseled clarity informs the Ravel waltzes. It turns downright aggressive in the case of Bartok's gaudy score, which follows the sleaze and violence of the ballet to the letter. Boulez began his conducting career with the complete ballet, and he made its lewd trombone slides, squealing clarinets and shrieking brasses feel all of a piece with his riveting performance. Don't miss Sunday's "Beyond the Score" concert in which he and narrator Gerard McBurney will deconstruct its manifold miracles.

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jvonrhein@tribune.com

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